


White Flag

by ktula



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Angst, Hurt No Comfort, M/M, Post-TRoS
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-13
Updated: 2020-03-13
Packaged: 2021-03-01 04:55:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,432
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23129644
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ktula/pseuds/ktula
Summary: The Finalizer is incapacitated at Batuu.
Relationships: Armitage Hux/Kylo Ren
Comments: 39
Kudos: 131





	White Flag

**Author's Note:**

> I had some feelings about The Rise of Skywalker. Not just about the movie itself, but also the information surrounding the movie, the pieces we got and the pieces we didn't get, the things that are in the supplemental materials, the things that are still left open.
> 
> I made this for me, as a way to process. I hope it might be helpful for you, too, if you're still working through things.
> 
> Crait is mentioned twice, in the context of domestic violence. This piece is in the same vein as [No More, No Less](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13058757) but less detailed, if that helps contextualize it.

The _Finalizer_ is incapacitated at Batuu.

Hux watches from _Steadfast_ , hand gripping his wrist behind his back, knuckles bloodless. It’s subtle, at first—a flare of fire by the ventral cannons.

Then more.

More.

(Ren dragged him onto the _Steadfast_. The rabid cur, leashed.)

There is fire breaking out across the length of the entire ship.

When the _Finalizer_ cracks in half, planetary gravity pulling the pieces toward the surface, Hux can feel his nails breaking through his skin.

(He would rather have died.)

*

The blood on his palms is like rust, the remnants of an inferior metal that serves no use. They’d still built with it on Arkanis, used it for trinkets, talismans to ward off the spirits. He’d brought a trinket to the academy with him. It had been confiscated, and then the academy had been destroyed.

He should have learned not to love.

*

It takes a long time to scrub the blood from underneath his nails.

His breathing is ragged, and won’t calm. He turns the water off, hangs his head in the abject silence, and waits for something to happen.

When nothing does, he lifts his head, turns the water back on.

Resumes cleaning his nails.

(His heart still aches.)

*

Afterwards, he goes to Ren’s chambers. They’re as cold on the _Steadfast_ as they are on the _Finalizer_.

(Were.)

The door opens to his identification. All the lights are off.

He finds his way in the dark, searches with his bare fingertips until he finds the bottle, pours a glass of whiskey. Brings it to his lips.

Drinks.

(Once, he’d cleaned a spill off the floor while they watched him, and laughed. Years later, he’d made Ren do the same—only Ren had licked it up. He hadn’t let Ren blow him, then. Maybe he should have. Maybe it would have changed—)

Hux’s stomach twists.

Everything comes back up in Ren’s refresher. The whiskey, and then the bile. Then, nothing but spit.

Then, nothing at all.

(The muscles still twitch, even though there’s no point to it anymore, and maybe never had been.)

Afterwards, Hux washes his face. Washes his hands. Goes back to the darkened front room, stands there in parade rest.

Waits.

*

It used to be Ren, who waited. Ren, who would stand outside his office long after Hux’s shift had ended.

Ren, who would debase himself all over Hux’s body, and not draw out his own cock until he’d already made Hux come.

On the rare occasions Hux would let him, Ren would fuck him with his eyes rolled back in his head, only the whites visible. He could go for hours, until he’d wrung everything out of Hux that Hux would allow.

It made it easier to tolerate the pedantic lectures from Snoke about the mysteries of the Force when Hux knew for a fact that Ren was most diligent about practicing it for sexual purposes.

*

On _Steadfast_ , Ren doesn’t make an appearance in his own quarters.

Hux sleeps standing up.

When he wakes, his eyes are gritty.

*

They don’t send a salvage team after the _Finalizer_. The First Order has no need of scrap, and personal attachments are discouraged.

*

He wanders the halls of the _Steadfast_ like a ghost. Nothing feels real.

Ren finds him standing in the docking bay, waiting for a transport that won’t come, to go back to a ship that no longer exists. It takes seven minutes of stilted conversation, of hanging sentences, of dead silences, for Hux to realize that Ren didn’t come there looking for him.

It takes until the _Night Buzzard_ lands and the Knights disembark for Hux to realize why.

*

The image of the _Finalizer_ breaking in half haunts Hux’s sleep.

He lies in bed staring at the ceiling, and hears the debris crashing to the surface of Batuu.

He closes his eyes, and he’s on the ship as it breaks apart, as the vacuum of space strips everything away, leaving him standing on a dead bridge.

His lungs burn from not being able to breathe, but he doesn’t die. He persists.

There’s no victory in it.

It just…is.

*

Ren hasn’t contacted him.

Hux is still on the _Steadfast_ , a general without a ship. Pryde is in command, and was one of Brendol’s friends besides, so Hux just…does nothing. He visits the engineering department. He walks the lengths of the halls. He eats very little, and sleeps even less. Over the span of three months, he has picked up and moved every single item in Ren’s chambers one quarter inch to the right. He sleeps in Ren’s bed.

(He hears rumours that Ren is wiping out a Force settlement on some obscure planet in the Outer Rim.)

*

What is a General without a ship?

*

They’d talked about it, in the post-orgasm glow, Ren’s body wrapped around Hux’s like some kind of a tentacle beast, over-warm and handsy even in the afterglow.

“I’d ditch the title,” Hux had said, watching the smoke curl away from his cigarra up to the ceiling vent, where it would be whisked out of the room entire.

“What would you take instead?” Ren had asked.

Hux had considered. Contemplated. “Chancellor,” he said, finally.

“I’d be First Knight,” Ren said in response. “ _Your_ First Knight.”

“Chancellors don’t need knights,” Hux had scoffed, and then Ren had giggled and tackled him in mock outrage, knocked his datapad off the side of his bed. Hux had flipped him over, because that was a point in time when Ren would let him, and fucked an orgasm out of Ren so intense that the preliminary sketches for Starkiller, located all the way across the room, had slipped off the desk, been scattered across the floor by the force of Ren’s climax.

*

There is no memorial for a ship. There’s no plaque. There’s nowhere to go, no place to visit.

(Once, he knelt in the wet grass on Arkanis, and he touched his fingertips to a worn stone, and traced the engraving with his gloved finger. He regretted, afterward, that he had not removed his gloves, but by the time the regret surfaced, he was two hyperspace jumps away. He has never gone back for anything in his life. He would not go back for this.)

*

How do you scrap a General?

*

When Snoke died, Hux thought it would send he and Ren crashing into each other for good. Acceleration. Fusion.

As it turned out, Supreme Leaders didn’t need Generals.

It may have been true that Supreme Leaders, no matter their age, had _never_ needed Generals.

*

His ribs never healed right after Crait.

*

They have climate control on all the starships. No one place is any colder or warmer than the other.

All the same, he feels a chill on the _Steadfast_.

He thought that there would be a replacement ship commissioned. _Finalizer II_. A new rank, to go with it. Something to honour promises they had made back when they were younger.

Hux has kept his half of the bargain.

*

(Ren used to laugh in the aftermath of his orgasm, like he couldn’t believe that they had done this. Like he couldn’t believe it wasn’t against the laws, like he couldn’t believe no one would punish them for it.)

*

When Hux passes people in the corridors, their conversation stops. They make eye contact with him, and they salute, but he is not invited to join, and the conversation does not start again until he turns the corner.

He hasn’t seen Ren in a long time.

*

Sometimes, when he dreams about Crait, it's a faceless void that pushes him into the console, and Ren dies to Luke Skywalker's hand.

*

It was Hux who touched Ren for the first time. Hux who taught him how to bottom, to top, to kiss.

It was Ren who touched Hux for the last.

(Ren didn't need to teach Hux how to be hit. That was a lesson learned long ago. Armitage wanted to forget, but it's in his blood.)

*

He never went back to Jakku. His childhood is buried there, in sand dunes and dead ships. His adulthood began at five, with feral children and the sick-smack of a fist against flesh. With Rae Sloane’s hand on his shoulder.

Would that he’d left with her.

(Would that she had told him she was going to go.)

*

Someday, someone will ask him why.

And he'll say it's about Kylo Ren, that it's always been about Kylo Ren. That he wants—that he _needs_ Kylo Ren to _lose._

But in truth?

It’s more than that.

*

They don't hold funerals for ships.

**Author's Note:**

> _I will go down with this ship_   
>  _And I won't put my hands up and surrender_   
>  _There will be no white flag above my door..._
> 
> My thanks to Deadsy, who beta'd this for me.
> 
> I'm on [twitter](https://twitter.com/heyktula), mostly, and still deep in my feelings.


End file.
